Reflections on Haiti
by Winford James
Posted: March 08, 2004
I suppose I know a lot about Haiti, but I can't say that I really know the place. Which has pained me as a Caribbean man so much that I have chained the pain in a corner of my soul where it cannot ravage me. But with events like the recent violent ouster of its first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the pain breaks my careful restraints. Despite my best cogitations, Haiti disappoints and depresses me.
I have never set foot on its soil and the closest I have come to making physical contact is passing through its airport one or two times. But I have read histories and commentaries about it, interacted with some of its people, and studied its Creole language. I know therefore that it is the first black republic in the African diaspora. I know it has had dictator after dictator for more than two centuries of Creole rule. I know it has been dirt-poor while being rich in human creative potential. I know it has been carrying the burden of the wrath of not only its former colonial master, France, but of also all other European and European-descended controllers of modern political space, including the United States. I know it has been shunned, politically and sociologically, by the rest of the Caribbean - indeed, by practically the entire world - for almost all of its republican existence. I know….
And so no country, not only the United States but also Caricom countries, wants Haitian immigrants or refugees, and almost no one wants to emigrate to Haiti. For most outsiders, Haiti stinks, and one of the most damning pieces of evidence, without the shadow of a doubt an ignominious blot on medical science, is that being Haitian was once regarded as a source of HIV / AIDS infection, along with other sources like exchange of bodily fluids and hapless drug abusers' sharing of contaminated needles. Yes, for most outsiders, Haiti stinks: it is dirt-poor, it is illiterate, it is uncivilised, and it has had a bunch of mostly black people who can't govern themselves for prosperity and social advancement.
And yet, this is a country where creoles overthrew one of the modern world's mightiest colonizers and set up a proud black republic. This is the country where the dream of Creole rule in the African diaspora first began to come true. More than two centuries later, when it got to the stage of its first democratic leadership, a ragtag group of rebels with no plan whatsoever for moving the country forward forces Aristide out in the name of 'liberté'.
Freedom from what? I ask myself. From Aristide to the likes of Guy Phillipe? What does Phillipe have to offer? The man seems interested mostly in heading a re-established military. There is absolutely no sense from him of the long dark road Haiti has travelled, of the few strides it has made, of the significance in its evolution of democratic rule, or of the need for Haiti to become a modern society. In disbanding the army, Aristide made the mistake of leaving him and other soldiers with their guns, and Phillipe seized the opportunity of sufficient popular disaffection with Aristide's misguided IMF-dictated economic and social policies to violently run him out of power.
But while Phillipe is clearly out of his depth where running the country is concerned, the Americans, who clearly opportunistically let him execute his rebellion and participated in his ouster (to save his life, they say), are now interested in restoring civil order and safeguarding democracy (no talk of building the economy!). And they are pushing the head that they didn't intervene before because Aristide was mismanaging the economy and had descended to rule by thuggery, and they were not about to protect the rule of a leader with such self-inflicted wounds.
Never mind their record of preserving the rule of dictator after dictator in other parts of the world, once it suited their twisty foreign policies and purposes. Never mind their dominant influence in IMF policy formulation. Never mind the fact that they had been monitoring Aristide's 'mismanagement' and said nothing about it. All of a sudden, the champion of democracy was content to sit back and let a clueless band of rebels close a democratic presidency down and then intervene, after that astonishing event, to take him out to safety with the generous assistance of the former French colonial master, and proceed to establish civil order.
It would not be the first time that America was lying to the world; it will not be the last. If America could lie on Iraq, it can certainly lie on Haiti. Iraq stank of a warmongering, imperialist dictator with weapons of mass destruction that threatened American economic security. Haiti stank of democratic Aristide's economic mismanagement, apart from its other famous societal diseases.
Haiti's inability over the years to manage itself into an educated, prosperous, modern society is ethnically unsettling. The continuing campaign by the European-descended masters of the world against Haiti's attempts to progress (isn't it France, by the way, that harbours the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier?), is racially unsettling. The obvious weakness of the voice of Caricom on Haiti is politically unsettling. And the social disconnection of the rest of the Caribbean from Haiti is, well, just shameful.
I've got to chain this pain again.
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